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yuletideTrue Detective: Night Country
Kyle Murchison Booth Stories
Companion
Kraken
My Sister and the Prince
Dragonriders of Pern (2x)
snickficFirst, my gifts:
Endless Night, True Detective: Night Country, Danvers/Navarro, 4.6k. My author took my prompt "what if the sun didn't come back" and ran with it. Great apostalyptic vibe here, and my shiiiiip. <3
The Inheritance of Imogen Dearborn, Kyle Murchison Booth Stories, Booth/Ratcliffe, 13!!!!!k. Booth needs Ratcliffe's help with an acquisition at a decaying house in the country, and things get weird, as they so often do around Booth. I freaking love this fandom's dedication to casefic*, and this is a wonderful example of a case that's great on its own merits and all the better because the relationship growing around the edges. <3 <3 <3
(*I'm developing the theory that the KMB stories are basically the perfect canon for producing casefic: the canon is already a series of casefics, already in prose, and they're nearly all pretty short. Put that all together, and writers have the perfect model to work from.)
And now for the other fics I've loved so far:
boot error, Companion (2025), Iris gen, 2.6k. Iris confronts life without an operating system. It was great to see Iris here, trying to figure out exactly what it means to be a person when one's whole personality is made of code.
Written in squid ink, Kraken - China Mieville, Billy/Dane, 3k. Not everyone in the Church of the Kraken was blessed with a tattoo in squid ink, but Dane was one of the lucky few, and at a young age too. I loved seeing an interpretation of soulmate marks specifically for this canon, and I loved all of Dane's weird fantasies and fetishes and imagined acts of religious devotion, and how they all got tangled up together.
Touching the Moon, My Sister and the Prince, Marie gen, 4k. This is how it happened; and what happened, after. The canon is a short film that is incredibly compelling considering it's two actors on one set for a single scene. You should watch it and then read this structurally creative and heartwrenching answer to the question of what came next.
Hunger, Dragonriders of Pern, Kylara/Lessa, 2.7k. Both Lessa and Kylara are Searched for Nemorth's final clutch. This Kylara feels exactly right to me: scheming, focused on her own desires and ambitions, fully aware of her own strengths and at least some of the weaknesses of others, and above all with an eye for opportunity. And the actual events, brief though they, promise a very interesting future for this version of canon. :D
The day the riders came, Dragonriders of Pern, OC gen, 1.8k. What if the dragons of Pern and the Impression bond were anything *but* benevolent? Or, alternately: what if the dragons were Lovecraftian horrors? This gets so dark in the best way, and the last line is a knockout punch.
silver_chipmunkmashfanficchick woke up. Then ze put in an Instacart order, and I went and took a shower and got dressed. My meeting today was not canceled, but obviously I didn't go.After the order arrived we had brunch, or lunch. A meal anyway.
And after the meal, we did some cleaning of zer apartment.
After that, we hung out a little while but at a bit after 5:00 I Ubered home.
All was well when I got here. Oreo was happy to see me.
I ordered my 2026 calendars from Calendars.com, my usual ones, the penguin, and the unicorn, and, what Oldest Brother always got for me, the teddy bear one. I miss him so much.
By the time they were ordered and paid for, it was time to Team the FWiB. We talked for a little over an hour and a half.
When we finished, I had a popsicle and some of the peppermint bark the Kid gave me on Christmas. Then I went to the bedroom and puttered on my phone til pet feeding time, when I came out and fed the pets and started here.
The snow is a few inches deep around here, nothing apocalyptic. Looks pretty.
That's about all.
Gratitude List:
1. The FWiB.
2.
mashfanficchick3. Quiet day.
4. Pretty snow.
5. Peppermint bark.
6. New Years Eve coming up.
shadowkatMother: Should I watch Stranger Things?
Me: No, I'd not recommend it - think Steven King and Steven Spielberg, circa 1980s.
Mother: What's it about?
Me: It's about a bunch of folks in a small New England town who stumble upon a porthole to a hell dimension, which brings in various demonic monsters - one captures a small boy. It's sci-horror. Very similar to the stuff Steven King and Steven Spielberg did in the 1980s.
Mother: Ugh. Really? Say no more, I'll pass.
Me: Told you.
I don't recommend television shows, books, or films to folks that I know won't like them. For example? If someone likes hyper-realistic dramas, with top-notch diverse casts, and hates fantasy and horror, I'm not going to recommend Buffy the Vampire Slayer to them, the Wire yes, Buffy no.
Why torture myself and them unnecessarily? I'm not that masochistic. Much easier to say - no you won't like it - it's a fantasy, with this that, and the other thing, and leave it at that. People need to be more tolerant of others tastes, and realize we most likely do not share the same tastes and leave it at that? Also, I'm a moody television and film and book watcher/reader. I go with whatever is calling me to it at the moment. If it's not, my brain will refuse to pay attention to it.
Finished Angel S2 finally - and it's a mixed bag. Buffy S5 is actually better - and more fluid and tighter. Of course it didn't have the problems Angel did. Angel S2, had some of the same issues Buffy S4 had - in that half of the supporting cast suddenly and without warning became unavailable in the second half of the season. Julie Benze (Darla) and Christian Kane (Lindsey) were both unavailable at the end of S2, and they had to write another story instead. Also, they ended up writing out Kate - because her involvement was contrived, also the actress got a role on Law and Order, and was unavailable. They intended to bring her back in Angel S3 as part of the Holtz story arc (she was supposed to be in the Justine role), but the actress wasn't available.
As a result, we got the Pylea arc - which is....not great. I kind of played a video game through it, and watched as background noise? I'd stop every once and awhile - out of curiosity - because I wanted to know something. (Such as Joss Whedon plays Numfar, who is told to keep dancing, in the background at Lorne's family reunion. And how Cordy becomes Princess, and how they figure out the way home (Fred figures it out with Wes's help).)
Takeaways?
( Read more... )
As an aside? You really can't trust Google's AI summaries, can you? I googled why Christian Kane and Elizabeth Roem left Angel or were unavailable - and the summary told me that Roem came back in the episode Same Time, Same Place in the 4th Season. (Uhm no. Also that's an episode in Buffy S7). Also when I was googling the Nosh Oven and how to fix something in it - it told me to preheat (you aren't supposed to, it heats up fast), and gave me the wrong cooking time.
It also says, Lindsey comes and goes in the later seasons. He only came back in S5, and on a limited basis.
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icanhascheezburger_feedFor a long time, this cat was just a familiar face in the neighborhood. Seen from a distance, admired, but never close enough to touch. There was interest, but also boundaries, and those were respected. Nothing was forced, and life kept moving.
Then one exhausting day, everything shifted. A few small meows, a look back, and suddenly the distance was gone. The same cat who once kept her space now allowed pets, leaned in, and followed along without hesitation. It's hard not to read something meaningful into that timing. When someone is tired, worn down, and just trying to get home, comfort tends to arrive in the softest ways.
Bringing her home feels less like a decision and more like the natural next step. She eats, curls up, and falls asleep on a lap like she's been waiting for this moment to finally line up. There's no big drama or uncertainty here, just a calm sense of rightness. Plans are already forming to do things properly, with a vet visit and care, but there's also clear excitement and commitment.
What makes this so sweet is how mutual it feels. This wasn't a rescue born from urgency or fear. It was trust, built slowly, choosing the exact moment it was ready. Sometimes connection shows up exactly when both sides are finally open to it.
thawrecka( Anime canons: The Summer Hikaru Died, Karaoke Iko!, The Apothecary Diaries )
( Movie canons: Hustlers, Edge of Tomorrow, Sinners, The Nightmare Before Christmas )
( All other canons: Carmilla, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, When Destiny Brings the Demon, Soulmate Goose AU, Womens Literary RPF, Manchild (Sabrina Carpenter video)/Orpheus and Eurydice, Hamlet, French fetish terms )
chazzbannerEvery time there's a Winter Warning for, oh, let's say, freezing rain then eight plus inches of snow, how do I react? I get furious.
Yes, I know that much of the snow from earlier this month has melted. I knew that the temps would plummet tomorrow. But why, oh, why, can't we have a swift three inches instead?
Bottom line: I need to be dug out and driving Monday afternoon, to pick up meals. I should be able to manage it, unless the system slows down, but .. it's frustrating.
I'm aware that I'm overreacting, and as a Minnesota native I should know better.
Yes, yet another 'weather' tagged entry. Aargh!
-
sistawendyThe music, etc.? Xtra cheezy. I loved it. Flashbacks to both my college dorm and my cross-country drive, boy howdy! There may have been... overindulgence. Indeed, the median age was somewhat older than the usual techno show, so things got rolling earlier and everyone seemed to be drinking more.
Tonight? A certain elder goth's annual Xmas party in Ballard, which if last year was any indication will have lethal quantities of excellent eats that contain sugar.
scalziwhatever_feed
Alita: Battle Angel is a $170 million dollar production from 2019 that feels and plays like modern CGI effects were superimposed on a cheap, janky science fiction film from 1985, the sort of $6 million, B-movie-level schlock that was put out at the time by Cannon Films or New World Cinema, two of the most notable “make ’em cheap, make our money in home video” studios of that era.
This sounds like an insult, I’m aware, and I’m not sure there’s an easy way to assure anyone that it’s not. I am not saying this film is prettied-up crap. I am saying it has a vibe, and the vibe is: the other movie you rent from a video store on a Friday night, once you’ve gotten the actual movie you came for from the “New Releases” shelf. You know, the one starring that TV actor whose series ended three years ago, and the Playmate of the Year from a decade back. The one that you had to decide between it and a Chuck Norris flick. That film. This is that film. It’s that film, on a whole lot of steroids and Muscle Milk. You can thank Robert Rodriguez for that. More on that in a second.
To call Alita a rehabbed 80s video store second pick is slightly anachronistic. The manga upon which based, in which an android warrior left on a junk heap searches for clues about her identity, debuted in 1990 and would eventually encompass nine volumes. It caught the attention of James Cameron, who apparently heard of it from Guillermo Del Toro(!). For a while Cameron was committed to directing it, but eventually picked another project instead, which would eventually become Avatar, a little indie film that struggled at first to find an audience but would eventually become a cult favorite. Cameron’s attention as a director was thus diverted, but he was still on board as a producer, and after some time another director was found: Robert Rodriguez.
Robert Rodriguez fascinates me a little because he is either a true cinematic polymath, or he’s a weird little control freak, or maybe he’s a little bit of both at the same time. He directs movies. He also writes them, which is not that unusual for a director to do. But then also edits them, acts as director of photography, operates the cameras, composes the scores, does production design, sound design and produces visual effects. It’s possible he acts as crafts services on his sets, too, I just haven’t found the IMDb listing for it.
Rodriguez rather famously got his start in film with El Mariachi, the 1992 action movie he made for just $7,000, if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of dollars Columbia Pictures put into its post-production and the millions it spent marketing it. But hey, they were the ones to spend that money! Rodriguez himself only spent $7k! When the legend is more interesting than the facts, go with the legend.
No matter what, however, the movie was made for next to nothing, and Rodriguez wrote, directed, shot and edited the film, setting the tone for future projects. He worked fast and tight and lean, and in this, he absolutely resembled the filmmakers from the New World Cinema and Cannon Films eras, who were given not a lot of time and not a lot of money to get their films into the can and into theaters. Prior to Alita, only one of Rodriguez’s films had a budget over $50 million (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, for $65 million), and nearly all of them made their production budgets back at the box office.
Is there a drawback to Rodriguez’s “fuck it, I’ll do it all myself” sort of sensibility? From a financial point of view, not really. From a creative presentation point of view… well, let’s just say Rodriguez does not lack for style, but you can feel when a corner is being cut, and he’s not always 100% percent in control of his film’s tone or his scripts. He’s mostly good, mostly fast, and mostly cheap, and also sometimes you get the feeling that along the way he says “good enough, print it” and moves on. If you’re a movie exec at a studio, you probably love this, because you know what? He’s probably right! And for what he spends on a movie, even when he’s not, you’re not out much. But that’s how you get the “second pick at the video store” vibe out a movie.
Which brings us back to Alita: Battle Angel. Rodriguez here is rather uncharacteristically credited only once, as director, but he also apparently did an uncredited pass on the script, paring it down from James Cameron’s original 180-page behemoth to something that could be watched without your bladder exploding before the third act (the final script is credited to Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis). The resulting script, however it was completed, is, charitably, disjointed. The progression Alita (Rosa Salazar) has from discarded android foundling to bounty hunter to rollerball athlete to avenging angel is telegraphed more than explained, and the forces she finds herself arrayed against, from bloodthirsty cyborgs to evil billionaires, never really gel into compelling menace. This is very definitely a “things happen because now is the time in the plot where they should happen” kind of movie. Corners, they be cut here!
If this bothers Rodriguez as a director, he gives no sign of it. He just keeps doing his job, shoving the story along, plot point to plot point, action set piece to action set piece. And you know what? His shoving mostly works! You’re not really given all that much time to wonder about the plot holes and omissions, because here’s Alita fighting cyborgs! Then kicking the ass of a whole bar full of cowardly bounty hunters! Then she’s off playing rollerball! (It’s not called rollerball, it’s “motorball,” but come on, there are roller skates and blood.) Rodriguez isn’t here to make much of his own mark visually — this is Jim Cameron’s (and the WETA effect house’s) world. He’s just here to direct traffic, with the biggest budget he’s ever had. He directs traffic just fine. It’s good enough. Print it.
What’s printed is all very heightened and melodramatic and maybe a little bit silly. It has the pulse and feel of a live action anime, because it pretty much is. In the janky 80s version of this film, all of the fight scenes would have been fought in a small dark room with chain link in it for some unfathomable reason, and the rollerball scenes would take place in a disused warehouse in San Pedro. Because it’s the 21st century and this movie has money behind it, we get the the widescreen CGI version with lots of destruction and chrome. The sets very much still feel like sets, though, just bigger, or at least extended by computers. Realism is not what they’re going for here.
Then there’s Rosa Salazar, who plays the title character. As with the Na’vi characters in James Cameron’s Avatar, Salazar’s Alita isn’t Salazar herself, it’s a performance capture. Salazar was on-set, acting the role, and then she was entirely painted out and replaced with a CG version of her character, one that has big anime eyes that skate her right up to the uncanny valley — which is the point for Alita, as she is not actually a human being but a cyborg. With that as a given, Salazar handles the progression from shy confused girl to badass warrior pretty well; what the script sort of slides over in terms of progression is given to her to perform. She provides the most nuanced performance in a film that does not exactly prize nuance.
(The other acting in this film ranges from perfunctory (Christoph Walz as the deceptively kindly doctor who finds Alita) to scene-chewing (Jackie Earle Haley as an improbably buff cyborg) to fluffy (Keean Johnson, as Alita’s love interest, whose hair in this film appears to have been stolen from a lesser Stamos brother). It is also weirdly packed with slumming Oscar winners, with Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali joining Walz in the “too much gold hardware for this film” category. Everybody’s gotta eat, I suppose.)
None of this is brilliant filmmaking, even if it is efficient, and much of it isn’t even necessarily good, but damned if I can’t stop watching it. This is a movie I put on when I want my eyes to see something that I don’t necessarily need to reach my brain — which again sounds like an insult but is not. Sometimes you have a day when you are just plain done, and you want something with pretty lights and cool action scenes and easy-to-follow emotional cues. If doesn’t entirely track on the level of plot or storytelling, well, you’re not in a state to complain about it anyway.
When you’re having one of those days, a little Alita will cure what ails you. Sometimes that second-pick video is the one that hits the spot.
— JS
waterswordYuletide very pleasant; usually I get a comment on an old fic or two in a fandom someone has rediscovered through Yuletide and gone on a deep dive for, but not this year!
About three or four inches of snow (7-10cm) fell overnight and I shoveled my front sidewalk and steps, because the snow removal guys had done next door but not us (?), and then tromped down to my assigned house in the neighborhood, where I shoveled the longest driveway in Rhode Island and enough sidewalk for two houses and what felt like two flights of front steps. Thank goodness it was light and powdery, and almost all of the above was in good repair so I didn't have to fight the asphalt like last year, but I earned every bite of the steak and eggs and homefries (not nearly as good as last time) at the diner.
And then C. and her kid and I went to the ZOO and saw CREATURES. Macaws! Ibis! Elephants! A two-year-old giraffe who is already trying to fuck the other giraffes in the enclosure (this is a good thing, they want genetically-diverse babies from him) but he's not tall enough yet! An anaconda 99.8% percent in the water in its tank, I wanted to boop its snout SO MUCH. Red pandas that were so fluffy they looked fake. The river otters were having so much fun in the snow and splashing in their pool. The docents were super friendly and the French fries were delicious. Would 100% zoo again.
Then a hot bath and a nap. Bliss.
icanhascheezburger_feedCats are not spoiled. They are simply living exactly the way they were always meant to. Somewhere along the line, hoomans misunderstood the arrangement and started calling it "spoiling" when really it is just proper service. Extra treats, heated blankets, and a dedicated sleeping spot on the clean laundry are not luxuries. They are rights. A cat does not beg. A cat reminds you of your duties.
Being spoiled is also a full-time performance. A cat will turn its nose up at food it loved yesterday, only to demand it again three hours later like nothing happened. Toys must be rotated for maximum excitement, water must be fresh enough to pass inspection, and laps must be available on demand. Miss one cue and you will hear about it in a very pointed meow. This is not attitude. This is quality control.
The truly spoiled cats are the ones who know they have won. They stretch out dramatically, claim entire couches, and look mildly offended when asked to move. They receive kisses they did not request and compliments they pretend not to care about. And somehow, despite the treats, toys, and total household control, they still act like they are just barely being indulged. That is the magic of cats. They make being pampered look like hard work, and they do it all while purring like they earned it.
icanhascheezburger_feedCat rescue stories are rarely straightforward. To begin with you have to take into account that whenever someone who finds a stray in need of help and they turn to their local rescue, they are almost always turned away on account of them having no room. So the obvious and simply solution to the story is already out of the question before the story has covered any ground. Then you are left with a person who is no cat saving expert, but leans on their deep love of cats to do their best to save this cat and give them a better life than the one they were subjected to on the streets. A tough ask of anyone let alone a feline rescuing rookie. But nonetheless this caring and kind person steps in and does what it takes to help the poor catto.
Only to discover that there is an underlying surprise, sometimes it is a behavioral issue, other times physical, or as in the case of this story you have a babushka cat, in that you might think you are rescuing one, but she is pregnant with four more inside her! Culminating in the rescuer raising their arms up in the air with some form of despair much like a late 90s TV dad would when the kids start acting up.
ride_4everSee full comm details, including how to post to the comm and how to add to the comm's AO3 Collection at rewrite_a_fic on DW.